Miller said: “I, in no way, want to be an officer who stands here and says ‘yes, we’re going to have to migrate Skegness’.
“No-one wants to be in that position, but we have to look at what that would look like.”
When asked whether the idea would be alarming for people living on the coast, he said “It’s possibly scarier to close our eyes to it, to just assume everything’s going to be fine. We know it won’t.”
A report published by Lincolnshire County Council in 2025, external, said if government funding could not maintain current flood defences there would be a “requirement to consider what a safe and just withdrawal of maintaining the current line of defence will entail”.
The report said it needed to consider a “managed retreat” from the coastline.
Miller said existing defences protected about 20,000 homes, 60,000 residents, 35,000 hectares of agricultural land and 29,000 caravans.
If a breach of those defences was to happen floods could spread up to about nine miles (15km) inland, and reach depths of up to 8ft (2.4m), he said.
Miller added that fast-flowing water would make any evacuation and emergency response “very challenging”.
On top of the human cost, he said the economic impact of flooding in coastal towns such as Skegness, Mablethorpe and Sutton on Sea could be in the region of £5.5bn, excluding indirect costs such as business disruption and loss of tourism.
